Kristi Noem and Mitt Romney disagree. South Dakota's Congresswoman joined 17 House freshmen at the end of June in calling for an extension of the production tax credit that boosts development of wind power. (Once again, Rep. Noem appears to have gone to Washington to talk, not get anything done: HR 3307, the PTC-extension bill she asked Speaker Boehner to bring to the floor in her June letter, hasn't moved.)
Rep. Noem's support for the production tax credit puts her on President Obama's side, not her nominee's. Mitt Romney plays capitalist and says the production tax credit should die:
Campaign aides confirmed that Romney wants the quick demise of the credits, which will lapse in less than six months absent congressional action, ending uncertainty about how he wants to phase out the credits.
"He will allow the wind credit to expire, end the stimulus boondoggles, and create a level playing field on which all sources of energy can compete on their merits," Shawn McCoy, a spokesman for Romney's Iowa campaign, said in a statement to The Des Moines Register.
"Wind energy will thrive wherever it is economically competitive, and wherever private sector competitors with far more experience than the president believe the investment will produce results," McCoy said [Ben Geman, "Romney Campaign: Let Wind Energy Credit Die This Year," The Hill: E2 Wire, 2012.07.30].
Noem's support for anything other than oil places her at odds not just with the corporate figurehead of the GOP, but the arch-conservative Big-Oil funders thereof. The Koch brothers and their "American Energy Alliance" front group are running ads criticizing Noem and other farm-state reps for supporting "wasteful energy subsidies" in the House farm bill.
So I'm still wondering: on energy, agriculture, and everything else, is Kristi Noem really a conservative? Or does she just go whichever way the wind blows her?
She holds her finger in the air and seeks votes.
Actually I think she just does whatever Thune and his staff tell her. She is there puppet.
South Dakota has a history of sending smart hagglers to Washington to fetch the money needed to keep our state's economy floating. Yes, they had other agendas, but the following never lost their focus on the voters' bottom line to bring home the money:
Karl Mundt, William J. Bulow, Peter Norbeck, Francis Case, George McGovern, Frank Denholm, Jim Abourezk, Jim Abdnor, Larry Pressler, Tom Daschle, Tim Johnson, John Thune, Bill Janklow and Stephanie Herseth Sandlin.
What each of these leaders have in common is they understood their number 1 responsibility was to make meaningful relationships with members of Congress from all states, knowing that a state with one (or two before 1982) House member needed to hustle harder than their peers to make sure South Dakota got a higher amount coming from the federal government than what South Dakotans pay in. What some of them have in common is they got turned out of office when South Dakotans felt they no longer held bringing home the bacon as their number 1 priority.
Kristi waltzed into Washington doing the Tea Party two-step and immediately committed herself to its politics of absolute polarization. Compare that to her predecessor who immediately worked hard to establish herself as a bipartisan arbiter to get things done, and Stephanie paid a price for that with her own party loyalists who stayed home in droves rather than to help her overcome the slim margin Kristi won with.
Now that she needs a farm bill passed and the production tax credit to help her state's economy survive, she's got fences to mend and obstruction from the Tea Party sugar daddies who bankrolled her election.
She's lost her perspective with South Dakotans and is incapable of building the bridges she burnt when she came to D.C. That makes her incompetent and vulnerable to go down like a house of cards when people start waking up to her incompetence.
We need that wake-up call loud, and ring it now!
AMAZING some one who says she is fiscal but vots for the farm program fiscal my ass.